Though they were inflicted decades ago, the wounds are still raw. They still throb with the jagged pain of a fresh cut because they are not injuries to the body — though there are those, and they are significant — but to the psyche. They are the wounds that come from watching friends lose their lives in violent, gruesome ways, from taking the lives of other human beings in ways equally horrible, from fearing for your life every hour of the day, from having to fight a war that people didn’t want to fight, from returning to the country you fought for only to be cursed, spat on, or ignored. These are wounds from the Vietnam War, and they still burn.
Steve Balgooyen knows. The theatre director and musician — he played drums for the late, lamented Barkers — did not serve in Vietnam (he was much too young), but over the past decade he has come to know much about the men and women who did and the suffering they have endured. He has read and studied the words of soldiers and journalists who were there during the war, in books such as Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried and Michael Herr’s Dispatches, and he has expressed their experiences on the stage, performing in and directing several productions of Tracers, a play by John DiFusco and eight Vietnam vets that portrays the lives of eight soldiers in the war. Through his work in those productions, Balgooyen has come to know numerous veterans and has been able to hear their accounts and see their wounds firsthand. He has even had occasion to walk in their footsteps, marching down trails and crawling through tunnels in Vietnam and Cambodia on a recent tour. Now he is directing another production of Tracers, one at St. Edward’s University, to bring the painful histories of the Vietnam War to still more audiences and perhaps in the process heal some of those longstanding wounds.
Balgooyen has seen such healing with this play before — the first time he staged a full production of it, in fact, while attending Earlham College in Indiana. The opening night drew a large number of veterans, and since some were there in full military dress and combat fatigues, their presence couldn’t escape the notice of the cast (which included another current Austinite, Ron Berry). Having so many people who had lived through Vietnam in the audience made the actors, who had not, a bit nervous. But the vets weren’t there to sit in judgment; they were there to make contact with a part of themselves that had been lost or repressed years before, to fill a void inside them, to make some kind of peace with themselves or their country or the ghosts of those they left behind. That was clear at the end of the performance, when, Balgooyen says, “every single vet came down and thanked us. They said that we had really helped them ‘come home.'” One of Balgooyen’s teachers, a history professor who was also a vet, paid tribute to the production in the faculty newsletter. “We were who you are,” his note began. “You are who we were.” These comments and others proved to Balgooyen that this play could do more than provide an evening of absorbing drama or even insight into a dark conflict in our nation’s history; it could do what the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., has done, give people a chance to let go of their pain from the war, to close the wounds it left.
For this production of Tracers, Balgooyen has chosen to incorporate a Wall-like component in the theatre. Inspired by the book Offerings at the Wall: Artifacts From the Vietnam Memorial Collection, he and the company are affixing slabs of Masonite to a wall in the Mary Moody Northen Theatre lobby as a place for audience members to write notes about the show or their feelings about Vietnam or people who served there or to leave items that speak to the war’s place in their lives. It will be a place of remembrance for the 59,000 who didn’t make it home, the 59,000 who came home but took their own lives to escape the pain, and the thousands upon thousands more who served and survived. Steve Balgooyen wasn’t one of them, but he knows how important it is that we remember. 
Tracers runs June 27-July 14 at the Mary Moody Northen Theatre on the St. Edward’s University campus. Call 448-8484 for info.
This article appears in June 28 • 2002.